1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a character generating method and apparatus for reconstructing e.g. a character pattern or the like by combining the elements of the character.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to reduce the quantity of font data in character generation, the practice in the prior art is to use a font scheme based upon the combining of strokes in which a font is stored in memory upon first being broken down into character elements (referred to as "strokes" below) each composed of a stroke body, after which the strokes are read out of memory and combined to generate the character. In the character generating process of this scheme, strokes constituting the character are constructed, stroke scaling or the like is performed as necessary, and the strokes are placed, as the elements constituting the character, at positions given for each character, whereby the character is eventually obtained.
In the font scheme based upon the combining of strokes, however, about 30% of total processing time required for character generation is taken up by stroke construction processing. Consequently, in comparison with outline font processing in which a character pattern is generated from data representing the entire contour of a character, the font scheme based upon the combining of strokes involves a character pattern development time that is prolonged by the length of time necessary for stroke construction processing.